Hull Daily Mail pulls porncoder comments

New twist in Beverleyporngate scandal

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The Hull Daily Mail evidently decided over the weekend it had received enough of a kicking over its Beverley porncoder investigation, and pulled all comments on both the original story and the follow-up.

For those of you not up to speed on Beverleyporngate, the Mail exposed the owner of Beverley news website HU17.net, Paul Smith, as the man responsible for coding "thousands" of smut websites. For further chilling details, see our two previous stories on the outrage here and here.

Suffice it to say, the Mail took a righteous shoeing from unimpressed commenters, one of whom was moved to thunder: "What a total non story! This man has done nothing illegal and runs a perfectly legitimate web design business. There is no question that any of these sites host illegal material so where is the story?

"This story is a disgrace to journalism and shows just what depths the HDM has now sunk to in an effort to retain readers. Here's one more reader the HDM can say goodbye to!"

Now, though, and despite the Mail's continued insistence that it "has kept the comments facility on this story to allow debate to continue", the "so called journalists who supposedly work for the piece of toilet paper that is the HDM"* have canned the comments entirely.

In fact, as of this morning, comments are suspended across the entire Mail site. El Reg's Moderatrix was earlier said to be "impressed" with the paper's handling of unruly commentards. ®

Bootnote

*Not our words, but we're citing public interest in reproducing the words of one particularly incensed commenter.